Exactly. What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life? It would be especially useless for students since it wouldn't last till the end of a school-day.
> What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life?
I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.
Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.
Most of the students I know at my university get maybe 3 hours on their laptops and many have Wacom tablets to write notes with. Most classrooms have plugs now. Writing directly onto the screen is a big value proposition for many of these students. I wouldn't count it out yet.
And I am sure it will be even less popular than a certain laptop that had less than 4 hours battery life and didn't even have a touch screen but it fit in a manila envelope (MacBook air)
Haswell will fix this. Microsoft does well when it designs for next year's hardware - sell to the enthusiasts, then wait for the masses to upgrade into their maw.
The main difference between the RT (10 hour life) and the Pro (4 hour life) is the CPU, isn't it?
A peak 17W vs 10W draw is a pretty big difference. And that's peak power; Haswell may be even better at idling. We might see 6 or 7 hours on the next Pro (wild guess).